Changelog • cowsay

cowsay 1.2.2

CRAN release: 2025-03-28

moved animals from a single R file to separate .cow files in inst/cows/; each animal is in a separate file now; update contributing docs accordingly (#95)
added some additional animals: dragon, beavis, blowfish (#96) (#100) thanks @Saru2003
change top of bubble to underscores from hyphens to match original cowsay better (#98)
fix endless_horse(): bubble and bubble tail was removed accidentally in v1.0 (#99)

CRAN release: 2024-12-05

Though this may not cause your code to fail/etc. the bubbles have changed to match that of the original cowsay program created in Perl - both the say function and the new think function. This is breaking in the sense that the output of say is fundamentally different assuming you care about ascii art.
say color args change: by_color param now by default is whatever is set for what_color - allowing for setting one color for both the quote and the animal. If no colors are supplied behavior is unchanged from previous version. (#85)
Imports changed. rmsfact and fortunes were previously Imports but are now Suggests because they are not in fact needed for the main use case of the package. Simply load them if you need them and this package helps when needed.

new function think() to duplicate what cowthink function does with command line cowsay - different bubble sides and tail (see examples) (#93)
A user (@oganm) suggested removing the speech bubble from the ascii art - and we agree! say has been refactored, now using separate new functions bubble_say/bubble_think and bubble_tail to construct the quote/speech bubble and its tail. The tail from the bubble to the animal has changed position so that it attempts to be at a position that makes sense for the specific animal. You can use these separate new functions yourself to manually do what say and think do. See the docs for details (?bubble_say/?bubble_tail) (#67)
New special variants of cows added to match the original cowsay command line flags -b, -d, -g, -s, -t, -w, and -y, which refer to Borg, dead, greedy, sleepy, tired, wired, and young appearance modes for the cow, respectively. Instead of adding a new parameter for this (trying to avoid parameter bloat) - and since this is just for cow - you can get these cow variants by supplying for animal cow + dead as “cow_dead” for example, instead of just “cow”.

stegosaurus fixed! apparently the ascii art for the stegosaurus in this package was a diplodocus. thanks @stochastics ! (#88)

CRAN release: 2023-11-02

remove multicolor temporarily as it is no longer on CRAN (#86)
use new special “sentinel” “PACKAGE” prefixed with an underscore for the package level manual file (84)
new animals alligator, goldfish, stegosaurus, whale, and wolf from @harriscw (#79)

CRAN release: 2023-03-08

makes sure to use a suggested package multicolor conditionally throughout the package (tests, examples, vignettes)

say() parameter what loses the fillerama options (“arresteddevelopment”, “doctorwho”, “dexter”, “futurama”, “holygrail”, “simpsons”, “starwars”, “loremipsum”) because the API is down
gains two squirrels squirrel and squirrel2 (#74) from @marionlouveaux
gains chuck norris chuck (#62) from @bgreenwell
the type parameter in say() gains new option print, the default option in non-interactive environments. type="print" will cat() output (#70) (#72)

fix to use of colors: if colors can not be used in certain computing environments, tell users that and set colors to NULL (#65) (#66)

cowsay now supports colors via the multicolor package from Amanda Dobbyn. supports coloring by the thing being said (new what_color parameter) or the thing saying it (new by_color parameter). supports more than one color. thanks Amanda! (#59) (#61)

@ateucher added support for the rmsfact package, for random facts about Richard Stallman (#45)
turkey animal added by @jeremycg , thanks Jeremy! (#46)
@LucyMcGowan added a monkey, thanks Lucy! (#47)
@GuangchuangYu added the BSD daemon, also called “beastie”, thank so much! (#48) (#49)
@onertipaday added support for quotes from the http://fillerama.io/ service with quotes from Futurama, Star Wars, Dexter, Monty Python, Doctor Who, and more. Thanks Paolo! (#51)